by Mike Parker
It was not an amicable divorce. The new group was regularly characterised by the old as being full of southern softies who didn’t understand the highly autarkic culture of the North York Moors. The ghost of Bill Cowley was regularly invoked in the spat, with both sides contending that they were acting as he would have wished them to. Claims and counter-claims streamed through the local papers and rambling magazines. Although hostilities have largely ceased now, and a few hundred people continue to tramp the route each year, there’s still an acrimonious whiff hanging over the Lyke Wake Walk – worse even than the diabolical sulphur of an Irish dance hall or Father Fahey’s incinerated clutch. Never has the Lyke Wake Walk’s mournful iconography looked more pathetically appropriate.
Chapter 8
WHERE DIRT MEETS WATER
Up the Brum: the Birmingham Main Line Canal, near Wolverhampton Photo by Roger Kidd
In common with just about everyone else who spent a large part of the 1990s tugging on a spliff, I’m a huge fan of the late American comedian Bill Hicks. Pirate videos of his gigs were almost inevitably playing in the dark Birmingham rooms, curtains drawn against the sunlight, in which I wasted happy years. Hicks, whose brand of comedy was brutal yet pierced with the sharp light of truth, was a hero to us all, and we would swap lines with the same nerdy enthusiasm we’d swapped football cards 20 years earlier. Even through the fug of those years, I can remember that there was only ever one routine of his with which I disagreed, the basis of which was the opening line: ‘The beach! The beach – let’s go to the beach! Ah man, what is it about the beach? It’s just where dirt meets water.’ Apparently, he recanted on this view before he died. I only hope that his change of thinking came after some transcendentally magical days by the sea.
As an island nation, we are pulled towards the coast by a centrifugal force beyond our control. For those of us from the grubby middle of the country, for whom the sea was but a distant dream, this force is nothing short of mythic. Every family holiday to the seaside would include a hard-fought battle in the back seat to win the ‘first glimpse of the sea’ competition, one which I, hunched defensively over my OS map, would take as a challenge to my navigational skills. Not that the map was much help: a sudden peek of a distant sea in the nape of two hills could come almost anywhere, and would not be spotted amongst the flat contours and colours of the OS.
Years ago, I climbed Carn Llidi, a rocky outcrop at the western extremity of Wales, just beyond the tiny Pembrokeshire city of St David’s. There’s a stone seat sculpted by nature at the top, which gives you a phenomenal view of the Atlantic shimmering off into the distance, and I was looking forward to settling in it, enjoying a quiet smoke and watching the sun go down. As I neared the top, I saw to my annoyance that a couple had already bagged my spot. Getting nearer, I noticed, as they stared out to sea, their look of hypnotised wonder, like some syrupy image of children at prayer from a Victorian Bible. It was a look I knew well. ‘You’re not from the Midlands, by any chance, are you?’ I called out. ‘’Ow did yow know?’ the bloke hollered back, in a broad Black Country twang. ‘Er, just a hunch,’ I replied.
Carn Llidi sits above one of Britain’s best-loved rights of way, the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, established as one of the first tranche of National Trails in 1970. The idea had dated back to 1951, when local naturalist R. M. Lockley explored the possibility of linking together existing cliff-top and beach paths around the county, and filling in the missing gaps. Lockley was also instrumental in the creation, the following year, of the Pembrokeshire coast as a National Park, still the only one in Britain whose geography and character is almost entirely coastal. This helped cement in the national mind the idea that the coast of Pembrokeshire is uniquely blessed, and somehow the best of all. It isn’t: lovely though it often is, there are finer stretches of seaboard elsewhere in Britain, even in Wales. No matter, though, for this early boost to its credentials still plays out today in the enduring popularity of the county, and of its coast path in particular.
You need a certain frame of mind to want to walk any coast path, but especially the 186 miles (300 km) of the one that skips around the frilly edge of Pembrokeshire. Despite my starry-eyed Midlander’s love of the sea, it’s a frame of mind that escapes me. I honestly cannot think of a more pointless long walk than this one. The county is a peninsula, jutting square-jawed out into the sea from the south-western corner of Wales, but that one peninsula comprises dozens of smaller peninsulas, meaning that often the stark choice is to walk a slippery cliff-top for three or four miles around a windswept headland, or cheat and cut across its neck, sometimes a distance of just a couple of hundred yards. Not only that, the path goes up and down like a whore’s drawers, through rickety steps, startling vertigo and muddy slides, rarely having much of a flat stretch on which to stroll, breathe easy and take it all in. If you walk the whole path, from the outskirts of Cardigan to Amroth, on the county border with Carmarthenshire, you will go up and down a total of 35,000 feet. And after weeks of effort, blisters, mud, sunburn, stings, gales, shitting seagulls and aching calf muscles, you’ll reach Tenby, just a few miles short of the end, and there a mocking road sign that states:
reminding you that you could be back where you began, all those days and all that pain ago, within three-quarters of an hour.
It takes a special kind of mind – a rather calmer one than mine, I suspect – to appreciate that sort of exquisite torture. Perhaps I’m just too much of a dilettante, or cursed with the attention span of a goldfish, but at the end of a two-week walk (the average time taken to do the entire Pembrokeshire path), I’d like to feel that I’d actually gone somewhere, that I had progressed through different landscapes and taken with me a cumulative sense of wonder at how they all fit together. Mile upon mile of seabird sameyness, up and down, down again and then up a bit more, would snap my sanity, I feel sure. But it is for these very same reasons that many people adore paths such as this. Its sheer repetitiveness and constant proximity to the endless horizon of the Atlantic acts as a fortnight-long Zen meditation. It is, to some, a kind of ultimate challenge, to be locked in the now, to walk only for the journey and not for the destination. And if you’ve ever been to Amroth, you’ll know how doubly true that is.
All the stranger to my mind, therefore, that anyone would want to tackle the South West Coast Path (SWCP), Britain’s longest single waymarked trail at 630 miles (1,014 km). The official start is at Minehead in Somerset, then it threads all the way down the northern coast of Devon and Cornwall, then all the way back along their southern coasts and that of Dorset too, finishing at Poole Harbour. The South West is by far Britain’s favourite holiday playground, thanks to its comparatively mellow climate and plethora of good beaches – things that are, in other words, best enjoyed at a very leisurely pace. I’ve walked various sections of both the Pembrokeshire path and the SWCP, and quite wonderful they were too, but the idea of doing either in its entirety fills me with horror.
The section of the SWCP that I’ve most wanted to see for years was the one perhaps least connected to the sea itself. The seven-and-a-half-mile slither between Seaton, Devon and Lyme Regis, Dorset picks its way through unstable cliffs and land-slips, past ruined houses long since demolished by the caprice of Mother Nature. Due to its inherently precarious character, it is beyond cultivation, and a semi-tropical wilderness has grown up there, one so dense and primeval that only the occasional glimpse of the sea, far below, is gained from amongst the deep greenery. This is the Undercliff, and it has held a special place in my heart since studying John Fowles’s classic novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, for A-level English, a quarter of a century ago.
One of our teachers – a gaunt, rather ascetic New Zealander, now sadly dead – knew all too well that the best way to drag a group of lumpen Worcestershire teenagers towards an enthusiasm for Fowles’s book was to hit the button marked SEX. This he did with dry aplomb, making us read out loud all the bits where Charles Smithson, the soon-to-be-unbuttoned Victo
rian hero would delve deep into the Undercliff for assignations with the wild eponymous heroine, Sarah Woodruff (or Meryl Streep in a red fright wig, as she is rather better known). The fertile, damp, earthy Undercliff was everything that the prim cobbles of nearby Lyme Regis were not. It was abandoned and licentious, a steamy green Hades. It was, I think, the first time that I made the connection between a place and its sensual, even sexual, possibilities.
Finally heading to Lyme, a full 25 years later, I came from Woody’s house on the edge of Exmoor, and decided to take a look en route at some of the east Devon resorts that had also long been names to which I wanted to put faces. Not really knowing my Exmouth from my Sidmouth, or my Ottery St Mary from my Budleigh Salterton, I decided to trust in the map to tell me. On the OS Explorer, Budleigh Salterton looked appealing: there was something about its leering cliffs, crooked lanes and genteel detached villas that drew me in. Not marked on the map, but even more of a pleasure to discover, was the town’s nudist beach. That’d be a symbol I’d like to see on the Explorers. Far more useful than a picnic table or yet another cruddy visitor centre. They could even differentiate in the pictograms whether it’s a nudist beach where you have a chance of keeping your dignity, or very firmly not. Budleigh Salterton’s would be in the latter category. It’s a steep shingle beach, so that if you go for a swim, you have to get out by catching a wave to crash you on to the pebbles, and then scramble on your hands and knees to safety before the next wave gives you an unexpected enema. By the universal law that most of the people on a nudist beach are the ones you’d least like to see naked, it’s not a pretty sight.
The OS version of Seaton, by contrast, showed it as spreading away from the sea in a splurge of what looked like inter-war housing estates, a tedious delta of Acacia Avenues and Wordsworth Drives. Even the prom looked moribund on the map, and when I arrived there next morning on the bus from Lyme, in order to walk back through the Undercliff, the notion was proved depressingly right. Lyme looks terrific on the map, and so it is. Tight knots of alleys, cuts, tiny streets and warehouses tumble down assorted hills to the beach and to the outstretched claw of the Cobb, the town’s massive medieval harbour wall. It was there that we first meet the French Lieutenant’s Woman herself, swathed in a jet black cape as she stared out to sea and the waves crashed all around. And if you’re not picturing Meryl Streep at this point, you’re probably remembering the Scottish Widows advert that shamelessly plundered the movie.
In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the path into the Undercliff is ascribed an undeniably moral, or rather immoral, quality. To the monstrous Victorian archetype, Mrs Poulteney, it is, quite literally, the road to ruin. To Charles, it is a way of such beguiling temptation that he is unable to resist parting its ivy fronds and plunging in. You get the picture, I’m sure, and Fowles ladles it on (‘an English Garden of Eden’) with lip-licking gusto.
It is not just the uniquely jungle-like atmosphere that gives the Undercliff path its heady scent of musky eroticism. History has only augmented the sensation. On Christmas Eve 1839, the greatest landslip of modern times ripped this coast apart, as eight million tonnes of farmland, in a tranche nearly a mile long, detached itself and slid two hundred feet down towards the sea. When it finally juddered to a halt, it had created new chalk cliffs and stranded grass-topped pillars, their freshly exposed whiteness dazzling all who came to see. A vast chalk canyon half a mile wide separated the mainland from the sheared-off section, which quickly became known as Goat Island, a Satyric invocation to a place beyond the rules. A natural lagoon formed at the bottom of the landslip, and Parliament even debated building a deep-water harbour there, though it soon filled with rocks and earth from the initial slide and its after-shocks.
For the tourism business of Lyme Regis, the 1839 landslip could not possibly have come at a better time. The Regency finery of Jane Austen’s era, when Lyme came alive as the postscript to the season in Bath, was a fading memory. The Cobb had been spectacularly ruptured in a storm of 1824, blowing five ships out to sea. Although soon rebuilt, better and deeper harbours were springing up all along the coast. Modern seaside tourism seemed to be the only answer, and, to that end, the resort invested in four bathing machines and braced itself for the future. The Landslip – it was soon capitalised – catapulted it into the big time.
By 1839, the fashion for the picturesque was everywhere. Scenery should be wild, noble and dramatic, and what could possibly be more dramatic than land that had ripped itself asunder with a mighty roar and a bone-stirring shudder? Even the mountains of Scotland, Wales and the Lakes couldn’t compete with that. Visitors came in their droves, on foot, by pony and trap, and by chartered pleasure steamers from Weymouth, Exmouth and Torquay. Locals hired themselves out as guides, embellishing their stories of That Fateful Night a little more with every threepenny bit proffered. But the greatest entrepreneurs were the two farmers on whose land the slip had occurred. The paths that soon grew up to steer the visitors around the Landslip – one for the gentlemen, and a less vertiginous one for the ladies – deliberately passed through both farms, and visitors would be efficiently divested of a shiny sixpence at each. Some tried to escape the charges and find their own way, often straying on to the land of a third farm, Little Bindon. The farmer there also charged the going rate of sixpence. Look-outs were employed to ensure that no-one escaped.
The Tourism Enterprise Award for 1840 must however go to James Chappell, the owner of Bindon Farm, on whose land the majority of the Landslip had occurred. By the summer after the slip, up to a thousand tickets a day were being sold, but he saw the potential for even more, and organised a fair for 25 August, culminating in a celebratory reaping of the corn that had continued to grow on Goat Island, the section that had sheared off his fields and now sat in strange isolation hundreds of yards, and a yawning chasm, away. As an added incentive to spectators, the most buxom young ladies were chosen to wield the first scythes, and, by the end of the day, you could purchase – and plenty did – a framed certificate with a few ears of the special corn affixed to it by sealing wax. Through the day, the many beer tents and food stalls, the jugglers and balloons all did a roaring trade, and the evening resounded to the sound of music, dancing and, as darkness fell, no doubt other kinds of merrymaking in the more secluded corners of Goat Island. According to the Dorset County Chronicle, 10,000 people had come that day. The Landslip was a goldmine.
So much the worse, then, when the owner of Pinhay Hall, newly built a mile or two from the Landslip towards Lyme, suddenly closed the Undercliff path that linked the town to its cash cow. Although it had been used for centuries by fishermen, stone quarrymen, farmers, labourers, smugglers and Preventive Men, those employed to hunt them out, Mr John Ames of Pinhay was having none of it. He had ideas about building his own arboretum, and didn’t want to see it ruined by a daily invasion of erotically charged ’Erberts and ’Arriets. He threw up a wall across the path, declaring that it was not now, and never had been, a right of way.
Lyme Regis seethed. A townsman, Joseph Hayward, decided to take Ames on in the courts. Three different cases took place in swift succession in Exeter, eventually coming down on the side of Hayward and the town. Ames had built a huge bonfire, to be lit as a final two fingers to the townsfolk on his expected victory, but instead he was landed with a court bill of £10,000. Hayward’s costs of £1,500 were soon wiped out by an active fundraising programme from amongst Lyme’s grateful population. In fury, Ames instead threw up eight-foot-high flint walls through his estate and funnelled the now legally proven right of way through the dank little gap between them.
The Landslip’s fame and allure lasted well into the twentieth century. When the tiny little branch railway from Axminster to Lyme Regis was finally opened in 1903, its only intermediate stop was near the hamlet of Combpyne. The station was proudly christened ‘Combpyne for Landslip’, a name that lasted until the Second World War. Landslip Cottage, now reduced to a few ivy-clad stumps, continued to dole out afternoon te
as to visitors into the 1950s. But by then, it was nigh on impossible to see the very features that had made the Landslip such an attraction in its early days. The blindingly white chalk-cliff faces had dulled, the natural harbour was long silted up, and everything was choked by dense vegetation that had been busily reclaiming the broken land for nature.
Today, the area of the landslip – Goat Island and the Chasm, let alone the lagoon – is abandoned to the elements. They are off limits, both officially to preserve the Undercliff’s status of nature reserve, but also practically, for you would be ripped to shreds by gorse and brambles if you tried to get through on the paths that the Victorian trippers gouged so effectively out of the newly exposed slopes. Coming from the Seaton end to the west, the Landslip area is only about a third of the way to Lyme, and as I stood and read the interpretation board, drily regurgitating the facts and figures, I gazed up at the still-impressive cliffs of the Chasm, now cloaked in green. Gulls and buzzards circled overhead, but their shrieking began to sound like happy visitors clambering in awe over the rocks and terraces. Awe, and possibly a subterranean pulse of lust. ‘Bindon Cliffs: Where the Earth Moves’ – even the interpretation board, decorated with its logos of multiple funding agencies, is slyly titled with a nod to its sensuality.
